Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [162]
I was twenty minutes late, but the first one there. Greeted with the same warm enthusiasm which gets Freeman so much work. His shirt is a little tightly stretched over a few folds of good living, and he seems a little hot in the face. He talks compulsively and shows me into the flat, furnished lushly with a great deal of ormolu and marble and rather fussily camp objects. A cigarette lighter is never a cigarette lighter … It’s a gun or a sea-shell. A very likeable man – who endeared himself even more to me personally by raving about the Python credits. Said he was embarrassed that he didn’t know our names, but he’d rung Python Productions for photos and they said they hadn’t any.
Alan F taped quite cheerfully. He asked me if I ever regretted not playing a musical instrument and I got going on that. When he wasn’t asking questions, we (Terry G, Terry J, Gra and myself) fell into a rather serious vein and talked about the problems of the world, etc. Graham said contraception and the control of the population was the world’s major problem. At least he’s doing his bit to limit the population.
John C, not unpredictably, was absent from all the various Python functions today, but the last of his Fawlty Towers series had me laughing as long and as loud as anything since Hancock and the Vikings – which must have been 15 or 16 years ago.
Wednesday, October 29th
Just after 9.30 this evening, when I’m getting my Chinese take-away out of the oven, and my bottle of champagne out of the fridge, prior to watching England v. Czechoslovakia all on my own, I hear the dull thud of a blast. It could be anything, but it’s a measure of the times that I am certain it was a bomb. Sure enough, on the 11.30 news there are the familiar pictures of ambulance, police cordons, etc, etc. At 9.40 a bomb went off in an Italian restaurant in Mayfair. No warning – eighteen injured. But the fact that I heard the explosion in our kitchen seemed to bring the whole horror closer to me – and genuinely set me thinking as to what I would do with myself and the family if a totally indiscriminate bombing campaign (as this recent one seems to be) continued in London.
No conclusions of course. I shall carry on shopping in the West End, parking in the West End, working in the West End, eating in the West End, as everybody else will – all helpless potential victims.
Saw Stephen Frears and Annie Zelda in the Welcome Chinese earlier. Three Men is ready, apart from the music. Stephen quietly, with eyes slightly mischievous, murmurs, ‘The word is it’s good.’
Saturday, November 1st
Studio recording day for Tomkinson’s Schooldays. I estimate this will be getting on for the seventy-fifth half-hour I’ve performed in and helped to write since Do Not Adjust Your Set began in 1967.
I feel more and more confident as the day goes on. Strangely enough both Gwen and Ian are a little less at ease. After all, neither of them have ever done a TV show to a live audience – whereas for Terry and myself this is our world, for both of them it’s an unfamiliar territory. But both play well during the recording and the audience seems to receive the show with many laughs.
I am racing around changing like a mad thing, and at the end of the one and a quarter hours recording, I think I’m the least qualified person in the entire studio to judge how it went. A feeling that I cannot get rid of is that the studio scenes received less reaction than they should have done – but everyone seems happy.
Tuesday, November 4th
Reactions to Saturday night’s recordings have been so far favourable. Anne H and daughter Rachel liked it very much. Robert H enjoyed it and laughed a lot, but thought I was a bit Whacko!1 I’ve had two long chats with Simon Albury, who liked it generally, but felt that there should have been more character detail – the School Bully especially, he felt, was one-dimensional and didn’t like him at all – whereas Graham Chapman (the only Python apart from TJ at the recording) thought the Bully was very good. More basically, Simon felt that I came out of it too softly,